The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of revising goals focused on content and audience awareness on the persuasive writing of fifth- and eighth-grade students. Students were randomly assigned to three different goal conditions: a general goal; a goal to improve content; and a goal to improve content and communication with an audience. Final drafts of essays were scored for elements of persuasive discourse relevant to content and audience and for overall persuasiveness. Students in the audience goal group were more likely than both other groups to consider opposing positions and rebut them. Students in both the content and audience goal groups wrote essays that were more persuasive than essays by students in the general goal group. The results also indicate that eighth-grade students wrote more persuasively than fifth-grade students and that girls wrote more persuasively than boys.

Much previous research has conceptualized pauses during writing as indicators of the engagement of higher-level cognitive processes. In the present study 101 university students composed narrative or argumentative essays, while their key logging was recorded. We investigated the relation between pauses within three time intervals (300–999, 1000–1999, and >2000 ms), at different text boundaries (i.e., between words, sentences, and paragraphs), genre (i.e., narrative vs. argumentative), and transcription fluency (i.e., typing speed). Moreover, we investigated the relation between pauses and various lexical characteristics of essays (e.g., word frequency, sentence length) controlling for transcription fluency and genre. In addition to replicating a number of previously reported pause effects in composition, we also show that pauses are related to various aspects of writing, regardless of transcription fluency and genre. Critically our results show that the majority of pause effects in written composition are modulated by pause location. For example, increased pause rates at word boundaries predicted word frequency, while pause rates at sentence boundaries predicted sentence length, suggesting different levels of processing at these text boundaries. Lastly, we report some inconsistencies when using various definitions of pauses. We discuss potential mechanisms underlying effects of pauses at different text boundaries on writing.

A random sample of language arts, social studies, and science middle school teachers from the United States were surveyed about their preparation to teach writing, beliefs about responsibilities for teaching writing, use of evidence-based writing practices, assessment of writing, use of technology, and adaptations for struggling writers. The findings from this survey raised concerns about the quality of middle school writing instruction. Many teachers believed their preservice and inservice preparation to teach writing was inadequate. Middle school students spend little time writing or being taught how to write. While most teachers used a variety of evidenced-based writing practices and made adaptations for struggling writers, such methods were applied infrequently. Most teachers did not appear to use assessment data to shape how they taught writing, and computers played a relatively minor role in middle school writing instruction. Even though teachers generally agreed that writing was a collective responsibility, language arts teachers placed a greater emphasis on writing instruction than social studies and science teachers.

We examined the relations of discourse-level oral language skills [i.e., listening comprehension, and oral retell and production of narrative texts (oral retell and production hereafter)] to reading comprehension and written composition. Korean-speaking first grade students (N = 97) were assessed on listening comprehension, oral retell and production, word reading, spelling, handwriting fluency as well as reading comprehension and written composition. Listening comprehension, and oral retell and production tasks were best described as having a bi-factor structure, capturing a general discourse-level oral language construct as well as unique listening comprehension and oral retell constructs which are not explained by the general discourse-level oral language skill. The general discourse-level oral language skill was related to reading comprehension whereas listening comprehension and oral retell were not. Although positive in direction, the general discourse-level oral language skill did not reach the conventional statistical significance in relation to writing quality. These findings suggest that the general discourse-level oral language skill underlying listening comprehension, and oral retell and production tasks is important for reading comprehension, and unique listening comprehension and oral retell skills that are not subsumed to the general discourse-level oral language skill do not independently contribute to reading comprehension.

Drawing from multiple theoretical frameworks representing cognitive and educational psychology, we present a writing task and scoring system for measurement of students’ informative writing. Participants in this study were 72 fifth- and sixth-grade students who wrote compositions describing real-world problems and how mathematics, science, and social studies information could be used to solve those problems. Of the 72 students, 69 were able to craft a cohesive response that not only demonstrated planning in writing structure but also elaboration of relevant knowledge in one or more domains. Many-facet Rasch Modeling (MFRM) techniques were used to examine the reliability and validity of scores for the writing rating scale. Additionally, comparison of fifth- and sixth-grade responses supported the validity of scores, as did the results of a correlational analysis with scores from an overall interest measure. Recommendations for improving writing scoring systems based on the findings of this investigation are provided.

We examined how raters and tasks influence measurement error in writing evaluation and how many raters and tasks are needed to reach a desirable level of .90 and .80 reliabilities for children in Grades 3 and 4. A total of 211 children (102 boys) were administered three tasks in narrative and expository genres, respectively, and their written compositions were evaluated in widely used evaluation methods for developing writers: holistic scoring, productivity, and curriculum-based writing scores. Results showed that 54 and 52% of variance in narrative and expository compositions were attributable to true individual differences in writing. Students’ scores varied largely by tasks (30.44 and 28.61% of variance), but not by raters. To reach the reliability of .90, multiple tasks and raters were needed, and for the reliability of .80, a single rater and multiple tasks were needed. These findings offer important implications about reliably evaluating children’s writing skills, given that writing is typically evaluated by a single task and a single rater in classrooms and even in some state accountability systems.

This study examined the time course of typing in prelingually and profoundly deaf as well as hearing individuals. Both groups of participants performed a written picture naming task and a written pseudoword task. Keystroke timing measurements from the written picture naming task revealed that the deaf as well as the hearing group were significantly delayed at syllable boundaries compared to identical within-syllable letter combinations. As the deaf are impoverished with respect to phonology based on spoken language experience, we postulate that syllabic segmentation is not crucially dependent on experience with spoken language. Furthermore, delays at syllable boundaries were not affected by word frequency in both groups, in contrast to the keys straddling a root morpheme boundary. Together with the finding that delays at syllable boundaries also occur in pseudowords, the experiments provide strong evidence towards post-lexical syllabification processes. Our results support previous findings which claim that (1) orthosyllables are autonomous and mode-specific entities, and (2) that the principles of syllabic organisation apply post-lexically.

The aim of this study was to compare the compositional performances of deaf and hearing students and to investigate the relationships between these performances and working memory capacities. Fifteen prelingually deaf, sign-using students and 15 hearing students composed a descriptive text and performed working memory tasks. The deaf students had poorer compositional performances in terms of fluency and spelling. They also displayed shorter writing and phonological spans. Correlations indicate that greater visuospatial capacity is associated with better conceptual processing in hearing students, but with an increase in grammatical errors in both deaf and hearing students. In the conclusion, we evoke ways of improving writing skills in deaf students in relation to working memory.

This article presents pupils’ awareness of writing as elicited through a metawriting task, in other words a task in which pupils from the third, fourth and sixth forms (grades) were required to write about writing. The analysis of the texts revealed the pupils’ increasing ability to write texts focusing on writing and on the subject’s relationship to writing. There are significant differences concerning the number of processes mobilised by the pupils to describe the writing process and the operations that take place within it. The increase in awareness is particularly salient in the case of planning during pre-writing. The pupils from the sixth form also mobilise a significantly higher number of processes concerned with the components of textualising (translating) and revising. The results for awareness of text and of reader do not present significant differences or any gradual increase. On the textual dimension, attention is given predominantly to the formal aspects of the texts, especially in the lower forms, while the emergence of other factors, such as genre, is still limited. As for the reader, this aspect of awareness receives the lowest number of associated processes when pupils write about their writing. The results revealed the dimensions and factors to which pupils in different school forms have conscious access when reflecting on their writing. The outcomes support the strategy of using metawriting as consciousness raising tool to increase pupils’ writing skills.

This study analyses the practices of nine New Zealand teachers of upper primary and middle-school students (N = 210) whose classes had consistently shown gains in writing far greater than normative expectations. Data from observations of three writing lessons and related interviews with each teacher, plus interviews with three focus students after each lesson, were considered in relation to learner gains in writing. To analyse these data, a content analysis matrix was constructed from selected writing research literature, yielding eight dimensions of effective practice: expectations; learning goals; learning tasks; direct instruction; responding to learners; motivation and challenge; organisation and management; and self-regulation. Instructional moves associated with each were defined. There was a significant association between three dimensions (learning tasks, direct instruction and self-regulation) and learner gains. Analysis also indicated that these effective teachers of writing employed an interconnected range of instructional moves in a strategic and flexible way. Instructional actions and activities are particularly effective if regarded as purposeful by learners and if they include meaningful opportunities for learner involvement. The findings detail strategies for generating higher than anticipated gains by learners.